Fender Hama Okamoto Precision Bass #4

It names a neck profile, not a position in a series. Fender designated the custom shape built for Hama Okamoto as the #4: a 38 mm nut in a U profile, fitted to a standard Precision Bass body and pickup. There is no #1 through #3 – the number is a spec designation, written in Japan as the “Number 4 shape”.

Because Okamoto plays a 1968 Precision that has one. Fender’s historical neck-width codes ran A through D, with A at 1.5″ / 38 mm and the standard Precision B at 1.625″ / 41,3 mm. Narrow-nut Precisions were a factory option in the late ’60s and largely disappeared afterwards. The #4 reproduces that spec, so you get the Precision’s split-coil punch with a neck that measures the same as a Jazz at the nut.

38,1 mm. I have measured all three in the vault – 2016, 2017 and 2018 – and they read 38,1 mm, which is measurement tolerance rather than a spec change. The profile held steady across the production runs.

The bassist of OKAMOTO’S, one of the better-known Japanese rock bands of the last fifteen years, and a player with enough standing at Fender Japan to get a signature instrument built to his own neck spec rather than a finish change on an existing model. Fender also released a Hama Okamoto signature Katana in 2021.

Not easily, but it is not a discontinued rarity either. Fender Japan still lists the #4 on its own site, and it has come back into stock there. What it does not have is an export route – it is a domestic model, so it does not appear in Fender’s European or American catalogues and your local dealer cannot order one.

Which leaves the used market in Japan, and that is where all three of mine came from: bought secondhand, each from a different private seller. Expect to work through a proxy service, expect the shipping and import duty to be a real line in the budget rather than a rounding error, and expect the listing photographs to be better than the descriptions.

The instrument did not. The range did.

Across three consecutive years the specification holds: I measure the nut at 38 to 38,1 mm on the 2016, the 2017 and the 2018, which is measurement tolerance rather than a revision. Nothing in the profile moved.

What changed is the palette. Olympic White joined the line in 2018; the earlier runs were 3-Color Sunburst only. That makes the finish a dating shortcut – a white #4 cannot be an early one, and if a listing pairs Olympic White with a 2016 or 2017 date, one of those two facts could be wrong.

If you want a Precision and have always found the neck too wide, it is close to the only factory answer to that problem – and the alternative is hunting a ’60s narrow-nut original at many times the price. If the Precision neck has never bothered you, the #4 offers nothing a standard P-Bass does not, and you would be paying a Japanese-domestic-market premium for a neck you did not need.